35 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
  2. Nov 2023
  3. Oct 2023
  4. Jun 2023
    1. all of these big Evangelical Ministries have Global arms Christian radio is is a really big deal 00:47:51 in Christian television in Africa and Christian publishing dominates uh Evan White Evangelical American publishing dominates markets Christian markets like in Brazil
      • Evangelical ministries are a carrier of the United States pathological nationalistic meme
        • It rides on the back of their spreading of gospel
        • Gospels have a mission not only to spread Christianity
          • but also a corrosive, polarizing, patriarchal form of politics to:
            • Russia
            • Hungary
            • Brazil
            • Many African countries
            • and many more
        • This creates a bizarre form of unity, even when countries are at war with each other!
    1. How has your life been blessed by living the Gospel and how has it sanctified you?

      Hey Naomi! I must say your insights and reminders here are powerful!

      To address your question, I really do believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is a message of good news. While we learn from the scriptures that the gospel is the gospel of repentance ("teach nothing but repentance" - Doctrine and Covenants 6:9, 11:9) , it essentially just means that we focus on preaching the gospel "which is the gospel of repentance and salvation through the mercy, grace and merits of the Lord Jesus Christ." That is good news: that there is salvation, mercy and grace for all mankind!

      • Lately, I feel that I've been surrounded by numerous deaths and illnesses in past two years. Grief has really taught me the impermanence of everything in our fallen world. But the more prominent feeling I've been getting is how lovely it is that I possess the knowledge of the plan of salvation. It brings me great comfort our parting in this life is not the end. This mortality is only a fleeting moment in our eternal lives.

      This is Elder Hugo Montoya in his talk, The Eternal Principle of Love:

      On the third day He was resurrected. The tomb is empty; He stands at the right hand of His Father. They hope we will choose to keep our covenants and return to Their presence. This second estate is not our final estate; we do not belong to this earthly home, but rather we are eternal beings living temporary experiences.

      • Another thing the gospel of Jesus Christ has taught me is that our time here on Earth is to become the person who we will become for eternity. When we meet Jesus Christ in His second coming and face the final judgment, the essence of who we are in that moment will shape our eternal existence. This understanding holds immense power in that each day the Lord gives me another chance to live and be with my family, I choose to improve upon myself, to surpass the person I was yesterday, so that one day, I may reach a state of self-acceptance, forgiveness for my flaws, love for all my cherished ones in the manner that Jesus loves them, and a deep sense of peace and comfort in the presence of my Heavenly Father.
    1. “The great day of the Lord” (D&C 43:17) refers to Jesus Christ’s Second Coming and the commencement of the Millennium. God commanded His servants to declare repentance to prevent His children from being destroyed with the wicked when the Savior returns. While some will give heed and repent, others will ignore and reject the voice of the Lord’s servants. Therefore, the Lord raises the voice of warning to repent through a variety of means: His servants, the ministering of angels, His own voice, and even the destructive power of nature.
      • a powerful reminder that the second coming of jesus christ is a joyous occasion, which is why it's symbolized by a marriage feast:

      "there's a marriage coming! It's gonna be great!" - dr. camille f. olson (https://open.spotify.com/episode/0vGHSOKivLW2MkDLwecsH2?si=73ef0cee0a3c47c8)

      • the prominence of the message of repentance stems from the fact that the gospel of jesus christ is a gospel of salvation brought upon by repentance, which is closely tied to humility. our recognition of our own nothingness leads us to rely on the boundless everythingness of our god to be perfected one day. (Doctrine and Covenants 6:9, 11:9, Doctrine and Covenants Student Manual 11)

      [[say nothing but repentance]]

    1. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.

      it's interesting that the accounts of matthew and mark do not include the specific mention of the remembrance aspect in relation to the ordinance they describe. luke and mark are both not part of the original 12 apostles, but the remembrance part of this ordinance is such a crucial detail.

    2. The Book of Mormon clarifies the real purpose and significance of partaking of the bread and wine. Although among the Nephites Jesus first gave the sacrament to the Twelve and then to the multitude, the only instructions he gave concerning the ordinance were regarding the multitude: “And when the multitude had eaten and were filled, he said unto the disciples: Behold there shall one be ordained among you, and to him will I give power that he shall break bread and bless it and give it unto the people of my church, unto all those who shall believe and be baptized in my name. And this shall ye always observe to do, even as I have done, even as I have broken bread and blessed it and given it unto you. And this shall ye do in remembrance of my body, which I have shown unto you. And it shall be a testimony unto the Father that ye do always remember me. And if ye do always remember me ye shall have my Spirit to be with you” (3 Ne. 18:5–7).

      i feel that the essence of the sacrament ordinance lies in its profound reminder to center our attention on jesus christ and his atonement, along with the multitude of good things associated with it.

      considering that only luke included the explicit mention of the remembrance aspect during the last supper, i wonder if our understanding of this element derives solely from that fragmentary piece of information absent in other accounts. does this imply that the apostles failed to grasp the significance of what they had just done which would actually evolve into an ordained ritual?

  5. Apr 2023
  6. Mar 2023
    1. he gained popularity, particularly among young men, by promoting what he presented as a hyper-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle.

      Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer and Big Brother (17, UK) housemate, has gained popularity among young men for promoting a "hyper-masculine, ultra-luxurious lifestyle".

      Where does Tate fit into the pantheon of the prosperity gospel? Is he touching on it or extending it to the nth degree? How much of his audience overlaps with the religious right that would internalize such a viewpoint?

  7. Jul 2022
  8. Apr 2022
    1. An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

      I seem to recall a book or two like this that were on the best seller list in the 1990s and early 2000s based on a best selling Christian self help book, but with an edition that had a journal like reflection space. Other than the old word rapiaria, is there a word for this broad genre besides self-help journal?

      An example might be Rhonda Byrne's book The Secret (Atria Books, 2006) which had a gratitude journal version (Atria Books, 2007, 978-1582702087).

      Another example includes Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) with a journal version (Zondervan, 2002, 978-0310807186).

      There's also a sub-genre of diaries and journals that have these sort of preprinted quotes/reflections for each day in addition to space for one to write their own reflections.


      Has anyone created a daily blogging/reflection platform that includes these sorts of things? One might repurpose the Hello Dolly WordPress plugin to create journal prompts for everyday writing and reflection.

  9. Jun 2021
  10. Oct 2020
    1. Take a look at the overlap of this philosophy with early Norman Vincent Peale's philosophy which apparently heavily influenced the Trump family.

    2. It’s difficult to say that the prosperity gospel itself led to Donald Trump’s inauguration. Again, only 17 percent of American Christians identify with it explicitly. It’s far more true, however, to say that the same cultural forces that led to the prosperity gospel’s proliferation in America — individualism, an affinity for ostentatious and charismatic leaders, the Protestant work ethic, and a cultural obsession with the power of “positive thinking” — shape how we, as a nation, approach politics.

      Power of Positive Thinking is a book by Norman Vincent Peale and provides the direct link to influence on Trump here.

      Also interesting to note the 17% number which can potentially be a threshold level for splitting a community or society from a game theoretic perspective. (Note: I should dig up the reference and re-read it.)

    3. A second strand in the development of the American prosperity gospel was the valorization of the “Protestant work ethic.” Written in 1905, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism traced what he saw as the specifically Protestant approach to labor as integral to the development of capitalism and industrialization. In Weber’s historical analysis, Protestant Calvinists — who generally believe in the idea of “predestination,” or that God has chosen some people to be saved and others damned — felt the need to justify their own sense of themselves as the saved. They looked both for outward signs of God’s favor (i.e., through material success) and for ways to express inward virtue (i.e., through hard work). While the accuracy of Weber’s analysis is still debated by scholars, it nevertheless tells us a lot about cultural attitudes at the time Weber wrote it.
    4. According to a recent Dutch study, that point of view still holds true today: Protestants and citizens of predominately Protestant countries tend to conflate labor with personal satisfaction more than those of other religious traditions.

      How does this juxtapose with the ideas of indigenous scocieties in James Suzman's article The 300,000-year case for the 15-hour week (Financial Times, 2020-08-27)

    5. Its roots, though, don’t just lie in explicitly Christian tradition. In fact, it’s possible to trace the origins of the American prosperity gospel to the tradition of New Thought, a nineteenth-century spiritual movement popular with decidedly unorthodox thinkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Practitioners of New Thought, not all of whom identified as Christian, generally held the divinity of the individual human being and the priority of mind over matter. In other words, if you could correctly channel your mental energy, you could harness its material results. New Thought, also known as the “mind cure,” took many forms: from interest in the occult to splinter-Christian denominations like Christian Science to the development of the “talking cure” at the root of psychotherapy. The upshot of New Thought, though, was the quintessentially American idea that the individual was responsible for his or her own happiness, health, and situation in life, and that applying mental energy in the appropriate direction was sufficient to cure any ills.
    1. Critics, including Sarah Posner and Joe Conason, maintain that prosperity teachers cultivate authoritarian organizations. They argue that leaders attempt to control the lives of adherents by claiming divinely-bestowed authority.[63] Jenkins contends that prosperity theology is used as a tool to justify the high salaries of pastors.

      This would seem to play out in current American culture which seems to be welcoming of an authoritarian president.

    2. In a study of the Swedish Word of Life Church, he noted that members felt part of a complex gift-exchange system, giving to God and then awaiting a gift in return (either from God directly or through another church member).[66]

      This philosophy has been around long enough that there ought to be evidence that it works for more than just the leaders of the churches. If anything, it feels like the middle classes that are practicing it are practicing it right towards poverty over the past 20 years.

    1. If Henrich’s history of Christianity and the West feels rushed and at times derivative—he acknowledges his debt to Max Weber—that’s because he’s in a hurry to explain Western psychology.

      This adds more to my prior comment with the addition to Max Weber here. Cross reference some of my reading this past week on his influence on the prosperity gospel.

    1. monk’s tomb in 1886

      Apocalypse of Peter was found in the same tomb and manuscript as the Gospel of Peter.

  11. Sep 2020
    1. Hanna Rosin of The Atlantic argues that prosperity theology contributed to the housing bubble that caused the late-2000s financial crisis. She maintains that prosperity churches heavily emphasized home ownership based on reliance on divine financial intervention that led to unwise choices based on actual financial ability.[36]

      This is a fascinating theory. I wonder how well it plays out for evidence?

    2. Oral Roberts began teaching prosperity theology in 1947.[4] He explained the laws of faith as a "blessing pact" in which God would return donations "seven fold",[26] promising that donors would receive back from unexpected sources the money they donated to him. Roberts offered to return any donation that did not lead to an equivalent unexpected payment.

      How does this track with the growth of Ponzi schemes and pyramid schemes in the late 1800's and early 1900's?

    3. Rather than asking, Kenyon taught believers to demand healing since they were already legally entitled to receive it.

      This sort of entitlement isn't helpful in American culture which is already heavily entitled, especially in white communities.

    1. Thus could Ken Copeland write in his Laws of Prosperity, "Do you want a hundredfold return on your money? Give and let God multiply it back to you. No bank in the world offers this kind of return! Praise the Lord!” In this mentality, tithing is a financially responsible thing to do. It’s a show of faith and a shrewd investment alike, a wager on the idea that God acts in the here and now to reward those with both faith and a sufficiently developed work ethic.

      And of course, if you're giving away 10%, you've got to work even harder to make up that initial loss!

    2. Figures like Kenneth Hagin, his protégé Kenneth Copeland, Oral Roberts, and, of course, Osteen himself built up individual followings: followings that often grew as a result of cross-promotion (something religious historian Kate Bowler points out in her excellent Blessed, a history of the prosperity gospel movement). One preacher might, for example, feature another at his conference, or hawk his cassette tapes.

      Some of this is the leveraging of individual platforms for cross-promotion here, which helped in a pre-social media space and which now happens regularly online, particularly in the "funnel" sales space.

    3. Throughout the twentieth century, proponents of this particularly American blend of theology envisaged God as a kind of banker, dispensing money to the deserving, with Jesus as a model business executive. Both of these characterizations were, at times, literal: In 1936, New Thought mystic and founder of the Unity Church Charles Fillmore rewrote Psalm 23 to read, “The Lord is my banker/my credit is good”; in 1925, advertising executive Bruce Bowler wrote The Man Nobody Knows to argue that Jesus was the first great capitalist. The literal money quote reads, “Some day ... someone will write a book about Jesus. Every businessman will read it and send it to his partners and his salesmen. For it will tell the story of the founder of modern business.”

      Note the strong restructuring of god in line with capitalism

    4. These three strands collided throughout the twentieth century, as the prosperity gospel came into being. It started — like the “work ethic” Max Weber described — as a way to justify why, during the Gilded Age, some people were rich and others poor. (One early prosperity gospel proponent, Baptist preacher Russell H. Conwell, told his mostly-destitute congregation in 1915: “I say you ought to be rich; you have no right to be poor.”) Instead of blaming structural inequality, Conwell and those like him blamed the perceived failures of the individual.

      This philosophy also overlaps some of the resurgence of white nationalism and structural racism in the early 1900's which also tended to disadvantage people of color. ie, we can blame the coloreds because it's not structural inequality, but the failure of the individual (and the race.)

    5. A final strand of the development of the prosperity gospel was the development of charismatic Pentecostal churches in America. An umbrella term for a decentralized group of churches — comprising over 700 denominations — Pentecostal churches are characterized by an emphasis on what is known as “spiritual gifts” (or charisms, from which the term “charismatic” is drawn). A worshipful Christian might experience, for example, the gift of healing, or might suddenly start speaking “in tongues.” This tradition of worship meant that, for a believer, the idea that God would manifest Himself to the faithful in concrete, miraculous ways in the here and now was more prevalent than it would be in, say, a mainline Episcopalian church. In addition, the decentralized nature of these churches also meant that individual leaders, many of whom practiced faith healing or similar practices, had a particularly strong effect on their congregations and could build up individual personal followings.

      Take a look at the potential relationship with these ideas and those described by Colin Woodard in American Nations and the overlap with Kevin Phillips' viewpoints.

    6. The prosperity gospel is an umbrella term for a group of ideas — popular among charismatic preachers in the evangelical tradition — that equate Christian faith with material, and particularly financial, success. It has a long history in American culture, with figures like Osteen and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, glamorous, flashily-dressed televangelists whose Disneyland-meets-Bethlehem Christian theme park, Heritage USA, was once the third-most-visited site in America.
    7. As Laura Turner notes in an excellent piece for BuzzFeed, no theological tradition is as rife for accusations of hypocrisy as the “prosperity gospel,” a distinctively American theological tradition. While it’s popular among many evangelical Protestants, it’s been condemned by many others. But to many of its critics, especially since the election of Donald Trump, this tradition has come to represent the worst of the conflation of American-style capitalism, religion, and Republican party politics.
  12. Aug 2019
    1.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

      This verse is often taken out of context, often to imply that God will give you whatever you want if you just ask.

      If you look at the two verses that proceed it, Paul wrote that he had "learned in whatever situation I am to be content". The next verse talks about being "brought low" and facing "hunger". This verse offers no support for easy success or a "Prosperity Gospel".

  13. Jan 2019
    1. The way he rebuilt it is a bit complicated but important: Look closely and you will see that there are four phrases in Isaiah 61:1. Jesus reads the first, second, and the fourth, but skips the third, “to heal the broken-hearted.” He leaves that out. Then he pastes in a phrase from Isaiah 58:d, “Let the oppressed go free.” The added phrase fits his theme theologically, but wasn’t in his original reading. He then deletes the end of the next verse, “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2b). Why all of the cutting and pasting? No one knows for certain, but presumably he deleted “Heal the broken hearted” to avoid over spiritualization of his reading.[1] He added “let the oppressed go free” because it comes from another compatible Jubilee passage, and is thematically linked by the word, “release” (aphesis, “liberate,” “set free”) which is found in both.[2] And he probably deleted the last phrase about the day of God’s vengeance in order to de-emphasize the negative aspects of the reading. The result is that he strengthens the justice portions and weakens the vengeance portions. So, even if one argues that he didn’t pick the text himself, he certainly made it his own.

      CEpip3 focus on justice

  14. Jun 2018
    1. sort through the historical and cultural debris of the latter half of the twentieth century in the hope of finding patterns where there seems to be nothing but noise.

      Similar and opposite to Adam S. Miller's statement about Foster Wallace's work in The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace: "The real is full of noise, and more, it’s full of patterns that look like noise."